Category Archives: Biotech

Five Predictions For Biotech And Medicine In 2012 – Forbes

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2. New genetic technologies will brave the valley of death. DNA sequencing is getting cheaper and making its way into hospitals. Some cancer patients (notably Christopher Hitchens and Steve Jobs) have used genetic tests to try and pick the right drugs for their tumors. But right now using DNA sequencing on patients is not making much money for companies that make DNA sequencers, such as market leader Illumina, and big funders like the National Institutes of Health are tightening their belts. The result is that the two publicly traded genomics upstarts, Pacific Biosciences of California and Complete Genomics, are trading below or near the value of the cash they have on hand.

The beneficiary so far has been Ion Torrent, the new sequencer maker bought by lab giant Life Technologies in 2010. It has been able to build a user base with its sequencing technology, an it could use this bulwark to launch a bigger attack on Illumina. The science will continue to advance. Whether its these DNA sequencer companies or next generation efforts like Foundation Medicine, the Google Ventures-backed cancer sequencing startup, is anybody’s guess.

via www.forbes.com

Study Examines How Diving Marine Mammals Manage Decompression

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"Until recently the dogma was that marine mammals have anatomical and physiological and behavioral adaptations to make the bends not a problem," said MMC Director Michael Moore. "There is no evidence that marine mammals get the bends routinely, but a look at the most recent studies suggest that they are actively avoiding rather than simply not having issues with decompression."

Researchers began to question the conventional wisdom after examining beaked whales that had stranded on the Canary Islands in 2002. A necropsy of those animals turned up evidence of damage from gas bubbles. The animals had stranded after exposure to sonar from nearby naval exercises. This led scientists to think that diving marine mammals might deal with the presence of nitrogen bubbles more frequently than previously thought, and that the animals' response strategies might involve physiological trade-offs depending on situational variables. In other words, the animals likely manage their nitrogen load and probably have greater variation in their blood nitrogen levels than previously believed.

Because the animals spend so much time below the ocean's surface, understanding the behavior of diving marine mammals is quite challenging. The use of innovative technology is helping to advance the science. At WHOI, scientists have used a CT scanner to examine marine mammal cadavers at different pressures to better understand the behavior of gases in the lungs and "get some idea at what depth the anatomy is shut off from further pressure-kinetics issues," Moore said. For other studies, Moore and his colleagues were able to acquire a portable veterinary ultrasound unit to look at the presence or absence of gas in live, stranded dolphins.

There's still a lot to be learned, including whether live animals have circulating bubbles in their systems that they are managing. If they do, says Moore, noise impacts and other stressors that push the animal from a normal management situation to an abnormal situation become more of a concern. "When a human diver has some bubble issues, what will they do? They will either climb into a recompression chamber so that they can recompress and then come back more slowly, or they'll just grab another tank and go back down for a while and . . . and just let things sort themselves out. What does a dolphin do normally when it's surfaced? The next things to do is to dive, and the one place you can't do that is in shallow water or most particularly if you are beached."

via www.sciencenewsline.com

NUS invests $150 million in mechanobiology

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There is a lot to admire about Singapore's long standing determination to develop its knowledge economy and propel its scientific institutions to global leadership.  When a decision is made to invest, they go for it, with world class expertise and funding.  Chris Hogue pointed me at this announcement of a 10 year, $150 M committment to cutting edge biology.  I've said it before, Singapore is a great place to be in the science business.

National University of Singapore (NUS) – A global university centred in Asia.
A new Mechanobiology Research Centre of Excellence (RCE), which will work on new ways of studying diseases through the mechanisms of cell and tissue mechanics, will be set up at NUS. It will receive a funding of $150 million over 10 years from the National Research Foundation and the Ministry of Education. The Mechanobiology RCE will be NUS’ third Research Centre of Excellence following two other RCEs – the Centre for Quantum Technologies and Cancer Science Institute of Singapore.


Led by Director-designate Prof Michael Sheetz from the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University and co-Director-designate Prof Paul Matsudaira, Head of the NUS Department of Biological Sciences, the centre will have three integrated inter-disciplinary teams working on cellular, molecular and tissue mechanics. The researchers will endeavour to develop powerful quantitative physical and biochemical models to define dynamic cellular functions, experimental reagents and tools for studying diseases of cells and tissues.

Sheeple

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Researchers have developed human-sheep chimeras as an avenue to addressing the growing demand for organ transplants.  Suprisingly  (to me anyway) these researchers have actually been allowed to produce a live animal, rather than stop the work at the fetal stage. So my question is at what ratio do we begin to consider an animal like this to be ‘human’ – 50%? 80%? 100%?  Note that the DNA itself has not been mixed.  Individual cells are either human or sheep.

O, what a brave new world.

Link: Now scientists create a sheep that’s 15% human.

Scientists have created the world’s first human-sheep chimera – which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The
sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells – and
their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted
into humans one step closer.

Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the
University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting
the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a
sheep’s foetus.

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of
human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a
transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own
flock of sheep.

Aside from the animal welfare issue, there are some real risks with this sort of research. In particular, a nasty virus could find itself in a new and permissive environment:

Dr Patrick Dixon,
an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: "Many silent
viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal
viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV."

Animal
rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they could
end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the
features and characteristics of both man and sheep. But Prof Zanjani
said: "Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage
does not result in fusion at all."